Dispatches from the Sporting Life (3 page)

The month before, the Canadiens, who’d missed the playoffs for the second year in a row, were sold to an American businessman from Colorado. He promised not to move the team south, but the Expos, it soon became apparent, were likely heading that way. I’m glad Pa did not witness this. It was the end of an era—but not unthinkable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Love you, Pa.

Toronto, December 2001

S
eptember 13, 1988. Wednesday. Montreal’s Mirabel airport. Before boarding our preferred carrier, British Airways, I loiter close by the insurance vending machine, making sure no shifty-eyed bastard, seeing off his beloved wife, is covering her for two million bucks and then rushing off to embrace his bimbo—“It’s done, baby.” Pretending to tie my shoelaces, I listen to unattended carry-on baggage that might go tick-tick-tick. Then, composing my soul, gulping down just one more cognac, I allow my wife to drag me to the plane. Florence and I are bound for a short stay in London and then on to the Scottish Highlands and the islands of Shetland and Orkney, where, in fulfillment of a long-cherished dream, I will fish for salar, the leaper.

Salmon.

The first known image of salmon, discovered by a French archaeologist, was carved into a reindeer bone, circa 12,000
B.C.
It was Julius Caesar and his
men, invaders of Western Europe, who dubbed it salar, the leaper. William the Conqueror and his barons savoured it and so did that swindler John Cabot, when he first sailed to North America in 1497. The first book in English on salmon, published in 1481,
The Gentleman’s Recreation, The Boke of St. Alban’s
—though possibly a compilation of earlier books on angling—is credited to Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell Nunnery. She went after the fish required for her Friday table with a rod cut from ash and line made from the hair of the horse’s tail. Then, in 1653, there came the essential book for fishermen,
The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation: Being a Discourse of Fish & Fishing Not Unworthy of the Perusal of Most Anglers,
by Izaak Walton:

Thrusting Izzy’s book aside, I begin to dream about silvery sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples of the Spey River. Casting with my usual panache, I catch plenty before we’ve even climbed to 33,000 feet, some 32,994 feet too high for London. Following two lap-of-luxury nights at the Ritz, tainted for me only because my wife insisted it would be bad form for me to practice casting in the lobby, we are driven to Euston station by a couple who are old friends: “Remember,” he said, “we’re expecting you for dinner the night of your return.”

“Should I order a standing roast beef from Harrod’s?” she asks.

“Nonsense,” I say. “I’ll be bringing fresh salmon.”

Then we board the overnight train to the Highlands and the fabled Spey, the fastest-flowing river in Europe, thick with salmon, according to legend. Once established on my narrow bunk, I turn to
Orkney & Shetland,
by Eric Linklater, wherein I read of a dizzying succession of Norse conquerors:

On arrival in Aviemore, we’re met by a tourist-office flack who drives us over winding country lanes, peasants lurking in the fields of ferns alongside, to Tulchan Lodge, a veritable stone mini-castle, complete with turret, that immediately evokes my
boyhood home. The butler who tippled. The saucy second-floor maid. My nanny, a treasure. On the other hand, that delightful lodge, rising in the Tulchan and Cromdale hills above the Spey River, is set in a rolling wooded parkland of no less than twenty-three thousand acres, admittedly a tad larger than my boyhood backyard. Tulchan was built in 1906, an Edwardian fishing and hunting lodge, the private property of one George McCordquodale, Esq., and did not become an
albergo
until 1976. Handsomely appointed, with oak-panelled drawing and billiards rooms, the lodge can accommodate no more than twenty-four guests in its twelve double bedrooms. A room will set you back $200 a night, but that includes breakfast, afternoon tea, and a four-course dinner, and the fare is first-rate. There are additional charges, however, for deerstalking, shooting grouse, or fishing. A rod, along with the services of a gillie, costs $170 a day. The lodge commands Tulchan Water, eight miles long, with four beats, considered to be the most productive on the Spey, but before we have even unpacked I am told:

Yes, yes, but I do not put much stock in these gloomy reports, because Mordecai the Deep-Minded,
son of Moses the Bald, has been salmon fishing before on some of the best rivers of Quebec and New Brunswick (the Cascapédia, the Restigouche, the Miramichi) and is familiar with the perverse tradition peculiar to salmon camps everywhere. The head guide, greeting newcomers, always complains that the water is too high or too low, and you should have been here last week when horny thirty-pound salmon had to be restrained from leaping into the arms of anglers, never mind taking a fly.

In the drawing room, Joseph, the menacingly obsequious wine steward (a Pole who had put in thirteen years as a butler), seems to have wandered in off the set of an old-time Hammer horror film; he stoops to kiss my wife’s hand and then asks if we fancy wine with our lunch.

“A bottle of Puligny-Montrachet.”

“An excellent choice,” Joseph oozes, dentures gleaming.

Late in the afternoon a middle-aged American couple arrives, Joseph greeting the lady with a ritual kiss of the hand. “Would you care for wine with your dinner?” he asks.

“People are so nice in this neck of the woods,” the lady says.

“Red or white?” her husband asks her.

“It’s all the same, isn’t it, dear?”

Husband, consulting the price list, chooses a bottle of Frascati.

“An excellent choice,” Joseph responds, beaming.
Greeted at breakfast by a rowdy group of grouse shooters out of Yorkshire, drinking Champagne, dressed in elegant tweed jackets and plus fours. “You’re not going after salmon this late in the season?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You’re Canadian, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

There are no keys for our bedroom doors, but the Fly and Tackle Room is securely locked. Seemingly, the guests can trust each other, but the Tulchan management knows that when it comes to fishing flies, anglers are a notoriously thieving lot.

The head gillie, wearing a deerstalker cap, outfits me with hip boots and a fifteen-foot, two-handed rod, traditional in Scotland. At home, we use a ten-foot rod, a one-hander, so I will have to make a considerable adjustment. I am driven down to a beat on the Spey, where I am astonished to see manicured lawns, picnic tables, and a fishing “shack” that would rent for $8,000 a summer in the Hamptons. In Canada, of course, we fish in rough country, bush country, blackflies and mosquitoes the unhappy rule. Within a couple of hours I can manage, but have hardly mastered, the two-handed rod and the tricksy Spey double-cast, all to no avail. The only salmon left in the river in mid-September are black salmon, that is to say, derelict scrawny fish that have loitered in the Spey for years and have learned to eschew any fly thrown over their heads.

Come noon, on Canadian rivers, I would not be surprised to see a moose or a black bear wandering
down to the water’s edge. But in the Highlands, at the stroke of twelve o’clock, an appropriately attired waiter is sent down from the lodge with a much-needed bottle of single-malt Scotch, white wine, and a baffling hot lunch: pasta served with a baked potato. Then, casting into a stiff wind, I spend another miserable two hours on the beat without raising a fish.

The odious Joseph is lying in wait in the drawing room with his
carte du vins.
“We’ll have a bottle of Château Margaux tonight,” I say, after consulting my wife.

“Very good, sir.”

“Wait. Tell me, Joseph, do you think that’s an excellent choice?”

“But, of course, sir.”

The American couple drifts in from their afternoon stroll. “I’d like a gin and tonic, please,” the lady says.

“Tanqueray?” Joseph asks.

“I don’t understand,” she replies, appealing to her husband.

“It’s their accent,” he assures her. “My wife would like a
GIN AND TONIC!”

The grouse shooters are back. Those self-satisfied bastards, preceded by an army of beaters from a neighbouring estate, have taken fourteen birds. I retreat to our room just in time to field a phone call from our friends in London.

“Well, we’ve ordered the wine, but naturally we’re counting on you for the yummy salmon.”

Shit. Switching on the bedside radio, I tune in on a convention of the Scottish Nationalist Party. The speaker proclaims, “The Soviet Union treats its
ethnic minorities better than England does the Scots,” and harvests wild applause.

The Highlands Tourist Office, determined to dispel a nasty myth, has issued a pamphlet that claims, “We have wet weather and dry weather, but no bad weather.” All the same, I waken to windowpane-rattling wind. Driving rain. But I’m out on the river immediately after breakfast, casting to no point until my arm throbs and cursing the Highlands Tourist Office for assuring me that mid-September was vintage time on the Spey.

Compensations. Today we have been invited to lunch at the Macallan distillery, some ten miles from Tulchan Lodge, on the Spey side in the lee of the Grampian Mountains. Kingsley Amis, who certainly ought to know, has pronounced Macallan “about the most delicious malt ever,” and I am inclined to agree, especially as we are being poured the eighteen-year-old stuff. In fact, by the time lunch is ready I have such an agreeable buzz on that I’m even willing to forgive our host for serving us locally caught salmon.

Chatting with the amiable W. C. H. Phillips, managing director of Macallan, I get some notion of just how much a productive stretch of the Spey is actually worth. In 1954, Phillips tells us, Macallan was offered a two-mile section of the river for $10,000 but, following a directors’ meeting, declined the deal. Then, four years ago, the two-mile stretch of the Spey came up for sale again. Macallan bid
$765,000 for
one-third
of it, and that offer was promptly declined as insultingly inadequate.

Following a quick breakfast, we say goodbye to our impeccable hosts at the first-class Tulchan Lodge, unaware that we have eaten our last good meal in Scotland. Weather conditions being what they are, our flight to Shetland, via Orkney, is delayed for two hours. The airline clerk is amused when I doublecheck that our luggage is tagged for the right island. “If you’re going to Shetland,” he says cheerily, “all you’ll need is an umbrella.”

Bouncing high over the North Sea, I calm myself by trying once more to tackle the history of our ultimate destination, Orkney, this time digging into a real page-turner,
Orkneyinga Saga,
the history of the earls of Orkney from the ninth century to the thirteenth, translated from the Icelandic by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards: “Earl Thorfinn had five sons, one called Arnfinn, the next Havard the Fecund, the third Hlodvir, the fourth Ljot, and the fifth Skuli. Ragnhild Eirik’s-Daughter plotted the death of her husband Arnfinn at Murkle in Caithness, then married his brother Havard the Fecund….”

On first sight, Shetland is absolutely haunting. Not a tree to be seen anywhere. Bare, gaunt hills, rock bursting like bone through the thin topsoil. Seemingly endless rolling fields of rich, dark peat, the fuel cut and stacked to dry here and there. Sheep foraging everywhere. And above, intruding helicopters
ferrying workers to and from the North Sea oil rigs. Our taxi driver is quick to point out that nobody speaks Gaelic here or would be caught wearing a kilt. The Shetlanders, honouring their Viking heritage, seem to identify more closely with Iceland and Norway (Bergen is accessible by overnight ferry from Lerwick) than they do with Scotland.

As we proceed in the wind and rain through the narrow streets of bleak, grey stone Lerwick, I can’t help observing that fishing equipment is being offered at 25 percent off everywhere, a depressing indication that the season is over. I also note that on the island God gave to Calvin, it is illegal to take a salmon or a sea trout on a Sunday.